Thing is though, Joe, some of the relatively virtuous wielders of power you've mentioned - Obama, Mandela, Tutu, Gorbachev - for various reasons to do with the vicissitudes of their time enjoyed compromised power only. Maybe that's the way it should be. The horror that was Thatcher made sure via her undoubted charisma that she was surrounded by a cabinet of brain-dead sheep. That gave her in her own mind the illusion of near-dictatorship, at least within her own party. She was starting to forget that she was living in a democracy. Like most people of that ilk, she eventually miscalculated and was brought down in the end by one of those erstwhile "sheep." John Major after her lacked the charisma to bring it off and was eventually driven to castigate the "bastards" in his own ranks. Blair was a far better politician (I use that term in the very narrow sense). Cleverly, he handed the poisoned chalice he'd created to Gordon Brown in the nick of time.

Trump starts with a clear run and a ton of hubris. Let's hope that his inevitable miscalculation comes sooner rather than later.